I tell this story a lot, but I have a friend whose mother wouldn’t let him watch Sesame Street as a child. She’s Japanese, and she wanted him exclusively exposed to Japanese culture. She was quite firm on this point. So the first he ever saw was when, as an adult, he was with a bunch of us watching Big Bird in Japan. He was, frankly, horrified. That is, until we very quietly explained to him that Big Bird is intended to be an audience surrogate for the children watching the show. His age wavers back and forth over the decades, but in general, he’s about six.
And, since 1969, he’s been Carrol Spinney. For the last few years, he was just recording the voice, because he is not a young man and the Bird is heavy, and a diagnosis of dystonia did not help, being the ultimate cause of Spinney’s stepping down from the physical Bird.. But most of that time, including public performances literally all over the world, Spinney was the man in the costume, hand held way over his head to manipulate the beak. He has taken Big Bird through every major incarnation, and it is only now, as he nears his eighty-fifth birthday, that he’s retiring.
In Big Bird’s earliest days, he wasn’t a child. He was a country bumpkin. He wasn’t ignorant; he was not very bright. I’m not sure how quickly he changed away from that, but it was relatively quick. His physical appearance gradually shifted, going from gawky to the gently rounded bird we know today. However, despite becoming a child, he still lives alone in a nest next to 123 Sesame Street—or along with his teddy bear Radar, at least.
It is through Big Bird’s eyes that we, those of us who grew up watching the show, learned about many things. Before Elmo, Big Bird was a much more common focus of the show. He didn’t teach me about death; by the time Mr. Hooper died, I’d already gone to two funerals, one of which was my own father’s. But for children all over the country, it was when Big Bird learned that death was forever that they did. Even now, I cry when he learns that the reason we die is “just because.” It isn’t fair. It never will be. But it happens nonetheless.
When Sesame Street characters traveled, Big Bird was always one of them. On the show, he went to Puerto Rico, New Mexico, Hawaii. On his own, he went to China and Japan. And I’m still fairly resentful that there isn’t a good release of Don’t Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve only been to New York once, but I was able to go to the Met, and I was startled to realize that the room with the huge glass wall from When Harry Met Sally . . . was the Temple of Dendur, where Big Bird helps an Egyptian child ascend to the heavens. I’m still not sure which one I was more excited at being in the filming location for.
No matter how much focus the show puts on Elmo, its true heart remains Big Bird. Sure, it was Elmo who was there when Hooper’s Store caught fire in a vaguely 9/11-inspired lesson about fire fighters and so forth. But there is nothing to him like the pathos of the time Big Bird’s nest blew away in a hurricane. And the show takes him seriously enough so that, when Gordon (Roscoe Orman) says it’s okay and Big Bird insists that it is not, Gordon actually agrees and says that what he means is that it will be. Big Bird’s feelings are taken seriously so that his viewers will know that theirs will be; that’s why the grown-ups met Mr. Snuffleupagus, after all.
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